Polar codes are proposed as channel codes for use in future wireless communications. These codes are competitive with state-of-the-art error correction codes and have low encoding complexity. See E. Arikan, “Channel polarization: A method for constructing capacity-achieving codes for symmetric binary-input memoryless channels,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 55, no. 7, pp. 3051-3073, 2009. Successive Cancellation List (SCL) decoding is one option for decoding polar coded information.
Based on channel polarization, Arikan designed a channel code that is proven to reach channel capacity. Polarization refers to a coding property that, as code length increases to infinity, bit-channels polarize and their capacities approach either zero (completely noisy channel) or one (completely perfect channel). The fraction of perfect bit-channels is equal to the capacity of this channel.